With the passing of the 40th anniversary of the JFK
assassination, Stratfor pauses to consider one of the less-
examined aspects of the case: Marina Oswald. Her connections to
the Soviet intelligence apparatus and odd marriage to Lee Harvey
Oswald are seldom factored into any theories surrounding the
assassination. However, the facts of the case make it clear that
the Soviet government wanted Marina Prusakova and Oswald together
in the United States.

Analysis

The 40th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination
has prompted the usual round of articles and TV programs
examining the assassination and theories of what actually
happened. The speculation is endless -- not because people are
searching for meaning in a meaningless world, as one TV program
suggested. Rather, the speculation is endless because the
official explanation offered by the Warren Commission is
difficult to believe. That may have been the way it happened, but
it is not a genuinely satisfactory explanation.

We don't have problems with the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was a
shooter, but we do have problems with the idea that he was the
lone gunman. There are four crucial points that, for us at least,
make it extremely unlikely that Oswald was operating alone:

1. Oswald had a beautiful, unobstructed shot from the Texas
Schoolbook Depository building in Dallas as the presidential
motorcade approached. He passed on a perfect shot, choosing
instead to allow the motorcade to turn left and proceed below his
window, and then took a much more difficult shot with his view
partially obscured by a tree. Why would he have done that if he
were acting alone?

2. The idea that he took three shots with his bolt-action Italian
rifle in the elapsed time (a few seconds) -- taking out Kennedy
with the head shot -- is just outside the box of credibility. No
matter how we strain, we can't get there.

3. The trajectory of the bullet that was supposed to have hit the
president and Texas Gov. John Connolly similarly strains
credibility.

4. The idea that Jack Ruby, a strip club owner and connected guy,
went to the Dallas police station on an impulse and was so
overwhelmed by uncontrollable rage at the death of his president
that he shot Lee Harvey Oswald strains our credulity beyond its
limits. Ruby was a lot of things, but sentimental was not one of
them. Ruby looked out for Ruby. Whatever brought him to the
station and to kill Oswald was not uncontrolled emotion.

There are lots of other things, but for us, these four issues --
taken together -- make it very difficult to buy the Warren
report. We can probably explain away any one of these aspects,
but the four things taken together with other anomalous facts
create a critical mass of doubt.

The only strength of the Warren Commission report is the weakness
of the alternative explanations:

1. Kennedy was killed by the American Mafia because Bobby Kennedy
came after them, despite the fact that Joseph Kennedy had cut a
deal with Sam Giancana over the West Virginia primary and the
graveyard vote in Illinois. This is a reasonable explanation,
except for the fact that it leaves no explanation for Oswald's
role in the president's killing.

2. Kennedy was killed by Cuban Intelligence because the Kennedys
tried to kill Fidel Castro. This is an interesting theory, except
that it doesn't explain where Jack Ruby fits in.

3. Kennedy was killed by the CIA because he wanted to pull out of
Vietnam. This one suffers from the fact that the evidence that
Kennedy wanted to pull out of Vietnam is pretty skimpy and the
greater fact that, in 1963, Vietnam was one of a dozen foreign
policy issues out there. The idea that the agency was so
passionate about Vietnam that operatives would kill the president
over it is just silly.

4. Cuban exiles killed Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs and the
pledge not to invade after the Cuban missile crisis. The problem,
again, is Oswald.

5. Hybrids of more than one of these theories. These make for
interesting reading, but the problem is that all of the hybrids
wind up involving dozens of people from multiple groups, none
with any reason to trust each other. How do you keep a hybrid
from leaking?

The only way some of these theories work is if Lee Harvey Oswald
was not involved or somehow was, in his words, made into a
"patsy." For any of the conspiracy theories to work, Oswald would
either have had to be an innocent victim, had someone else
masquerading as him or been part of a conspiracy that his own
background didn't easily bring him into. It really all comes down
to who Lee Harvey Oswald was -- a subject that has garnered
endless speculation.

Far less speculation has gone into what is, in our view, a
significantly neglected aspect of this story: Marina Oswald. From
Stratfor's standpoint, she is at least one of the keys to
whatever happened on Nov. 22, 1963. Our image of Marina Oswald,
dating back to the days following the assassination, is that of a
simple, frightened young woman, stunned by what had happened and
in way over her head. That image of a more or less innocent
bystander has remained intact for 40 years, even though the facts
have consistently pointed to her being a much more important
figure in the story.

Marina Oswald -- born Marina Prusakova -- met Lee Harvey Oswald
in Minsk, where he worked in an electronics factory after having
defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. She was then 19 years old.
Her father had been killed in the war; she lived with her
stepfather in Archangel, in the far north of Russia, before
moving to Moldova as a small child and then to Leningrad at age
12. In 1955, she entered the Pharmacy Technikum for what the
Warren Report called "special training." She received a diploma
in pharmacology in June 1959 and then was assigned to a job in a
warehouse, which she quit after a day.

Two months later, she moved to live with her uncle in Minsk, the
capital of Belarus. Her uncle was a colonel in the MVD -- the
Russian Interior Ministry security service. At that time, the
agency -- which was a mixture of a national police force and the
FBI -- carried out several functions, from running large parts of
the Gulag to serving as an internal security force. According to
the Warren Commission, Col. Prusakov was head of the local lumber
industry, which would have certainly made him part of the Gulag
apparatus and therefore part of the security structure. With a
rank of colonel, he clearly had substantial responsibilities.
According to the Warren Commission, Prusakov "... had one of the
best apartments in a building reserved for MVD employees."

In Minsk, Marina finally got a job in the pharmacy of a hospital.
At the same time, she joined Komsomol, the Communist youth
organization -- a fairly common thing to do and something that
her uncle, given his standing in the government apparatus,
certainly would have expected her to do. She had a good many
friends when, seven months after moving to Minsk, she was
introduced to Lee Harvey Oswald. They had one date -- at a dance.
Immediately after the dance, Oswald was taken ill and checked
into a hospital, though not the one where Marina worked. Marina
visited him often in the hospital often, although they had met
only twice prior to his hospitalization. She was able to visit
him outside of regular visiting hours, according to the Warren
Commission, because of her uniform. Oswald was hospitalized from
March 30 until April 11. It is not clear what illness kept him
hospitalized for almost two weeks, but he was cared for at an
ear, nose and throat clinic: He apparently had the mother of all
sinus headaches.

According to Marina's testimony to the Warren Commission, Oswald
visited her regularly at her uncle's apartment after his release.
The Commission makes a point of saying that "they were apparently
not disturbed by the fact that he was an American and did not
disapprove of her seeing him" This is an important point. Oswald
was an American defector, clearly regarded with suspicion by
Soviet Intelligence. Marina's uncle was a colonel in the MVD.
Having American defectors visit his apartment in 1961 should have
concerned him a lot. He would certainly report it to his
superior. An American FBI official entertaining his niece's
Soviet defector boyfriend in 1961 would certainly be cautious
about its effect on his pension; however, Prusakov apparently was
not concerned.

Now it gets interesting. On April 20, a little more than a month
since their first meeting, Oswald proposes to Marina. She accepts
and they are married on April 30. Let's pause here. Marina Oswald
is an attractive young woman. She holds a diploma in pharmacology
from a first-rate technical school in Leningrad. Her uncle is a
senior official in the MVD. Lee Harvey Oswald is a foreign
defector, without any real future and -- we are handicapped here
by our glandular bias -- not a great looker or sharp dresser. But
he must have been a hell of a dancer, because they were married
about six weeks after they met with much of the courtship having
taken place in a hospital.

OK -- it may have been uncontrollable love at first sight.
Stranger things have happened, we suppose. The problem was that
in order for Marina to marry Oswald, they needed to get special
permission from the state, because he was a foreigner. That would
have been true if he were the head of the Polish Communist Party.
But Oswald wasn't just a foreigner, he was an American defector.
Given the Soviet bureaucracy, someone in Moscow was going to have
to sign off on this one -- and it had to have kicked off one heck
of a security review in her uncle's office, but permission
nevertheless was granted in 10 days.

If that is hard to believe, try the next one. After about a month
of marriage, Oswald tells Marina that he's tired of the Soviet
Union and wants to go home. She apparently says "whatever" and
they start making arrangements to leave the Soviet Union. At this
point, she told the Warren Commission, her aunt and uncle became
upset and stopped speaking to her. A great deal has been made of
the U.S. Embassy's willingness to allow Oswald to return to the
United States, but not nearly enough has been made of the fact
that the Soviets permitted not only Oswald, but also Marina, to
leave the country.

In October, while this was going on, Marina decided to take her
annual vacation. According to the commission, Oswald and Marina
agreed that she needed "a change of scenery." Having been married
less than six months, she took a three-week vacation by herself
to visit an aunt in Kharkov. Kharkov in October is not the
greatest place to visit, but off she went.

When she returned, she pursued her exit visa. She met with an MVD
colonel, Nicolay Aksenov, who had to approve the exit permit.
Marina thought that the interview might have been granted because
her uncle was also an MVD colonel, but that makes little sense if
her uncle opposed her departure. On Dec. 25, 1961, about six
weeks after applying, she received her exit visa from the Soviet
Union, as did Oswald. Marina told the Commission that she was
surprised to receive permission. That is an understatement --
what happened was unheard-of. Although the Warren Commission
tried to argue that these things were not that uncommon, they
just were.

Let's recap here:

1. Marina, part of the Soviet upper-middle class, reasonably
educated and an attractive young woman, meets Lee Harvey Oswald
and is so smitten by him that she agrees to marry him in a little
over a month -- two weeks of which he spent courting her from a
hospital bed.

2. The Soviet government grants Marina permission to marry him in
the span of 10 days, despite the fact that this is an MVD
colonel's niece marrying a U.S. defector.

3. Oswald immediately decides to head back to the United States,
and in spite of her uncle's supposed objections -- and Prusakov
could have stopped this dead in its tracks if he wanted -- she is
granted permission to leave the Soviet Union in the company of an
American defector. The time between her formal request and
receiving permission is a matter of weeks.

If the Warren Commission has the facts right -- and we think they
do -- then this is clear: the Soviet government wanted Marina and
Oswald to marry and they wanted them to go together to the United
States. That is crystal clear. Now, we take a leap, but a
reasonable one: The only agency in the Soviet Union with the
ability and interest to get this done was the KGB. If Marina
wasn't KGB, she did one hell of an imitation.

Endless questions flow from this, ranging from what the mission
was to why the U.S. embassy permitted Marina into the country.
This now enters into the realm of speculation. However, one thing
is clear to us: Any theory as to what happened on Nov. 22, 1963,
that does not take into careful account the role of Marina Oswald
is inherently flawed. This includes the Warren Commission's own
findings. If Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy, there has
been no adequate explanation of Marina Oswald's role in this.

The only way to dismiss the Marina question is to make the
following three assertions:

1. You have to believe that Marina, the attractive MVD princess,
took one look at Oswald and said, "I've got to have that man."

2. You have to argue that obtaining permission in 10 days for an
MVD colonel's live-in niece to marry an American defector was no
big deal.

3. You have to argue that getting an exit permit from the Soviet
Union for Marina in the space of six weeks in 1961 was no big
deal.

If ever there was a cooked-up marriage, this was it. Now, how
this fits into the assassination story is too speculative to
bother with -- but that no explanation is possible without
building this into the story is obvious.

There has been tremendous focus on Oswald's stay in the Soviet
Union and speculation that his defection might have been part of
a CIA plot. That is not inconceivable, although the purpose of
the plot is opaque. There has been focus on Washington's decision
to readmit Oswald, even though he had renounced his U.S.
citizenship. All of this has focused attention on the CIA, but
there has not been equal attention paid to the extraordinary
story of Marina Prusakova's marriage to Oswald and her exit from
the Soviet Union.

This does not necessarily clear things up, but in our mind, it
sets an additional hurdle that any theory must pass over. The
eagerness of the Warren Commission to pass over the strange
marriage of these two is one of the reasons we have little
confidence in the analysis it contains. The fact of the marriage
raises questions of whether Oswald was, simply in the context of
his marriage, involved in a conspiracy. If he was the only gunman
-- which we doubt -- he still was not alone.